Online Marketing, SEO & Tech.

Tag Archives: shopify

Results of my first Ecommerce attempt.
The store failed. This started as an experiment to sell wall stickers and decals through drop-shipping on Ali Express and I slowly added other homewares to the catalog in order to try and make more sales.
Website: http://www.happynest.com.au
Platform: Shopify
Traffic Sources: Google AdWords and Facebook ads.
The most expensive thing about this store was the time I had to invest in actually finding items, adding them to the store and writing descriptions for them.

The store had about 500 unique visitors and only 2 people added an item to their cart and filled out all their details.
Why did it fail? I don’t know yet. It could have been the wrong type of traffic that I sent there, the pricing might have been off, the products might have not been exactly what people wanted, the descriptions and photos might not have been up to scratch, the timing might have been off.
All in all I spent about $300 in cash and about 40 hours of work.
What I learned was my way around the Shopify platform and that you should really pick a product that you have an interest in. I lost momentum quickly because I simply wasn’t interested in the product.
On to the next experiment 🙂

In this video I will show you how easy it is to capture traffic and maintain/increase “link juice” for search engine rankings. (PS there’s no narration, I recorded this at the library :))

The ecommerce store in the video is built on https://www.shopify.com who are my preferred ecommerce website builders. Here’s my referral link in case you want to help me earn a few bucks for this video 🙂 https://www.shopify.com/?ref=visible

So for this store I wanted to get a slight SEO advantage by finding an expired domain that had a decent history and good amount of relevant incoming links. If you Google for expired domain auctions, I’m sure you’ll find a few sites that can help with this.

I ended up paying about $100 for this domain: https://classicbaby.com.au which already has a domain authority of 22 and over 1000 links from over 130 different domains. (I still need to go through these to disavow a bunch of links, but its better than starting from 0 🙂

A site will start acquiring new links during its time online and with this method, where I’m repurposing a domain, chances are that I will have completely new/different pages and URLs on my new website.

The existing links are pointing to pages that do not exist anymore so visitors will end up on 404 pages (not found page) and the “link juice” is lost + visitors might think your website is broken and either leave or lose trust – which is bad for conversion rates 🙂

The steps I took in this video to try and make the best out of the incoming links is as follows:

I check my top referral websites every week or so and see where visitors are coming from and what page they were expected to land on.

To find the outside page with the link, I go to Google and use the following search operator: “keyword” site:referral.website.com (this will specifically look for the exact keyword on the page within the specified domain only).

I copy the full link and go to my Shopify “Online Store/Navigation/
URL redirects” section.

If I have a page that is very similar or with the same product, I redirect that old link the new page. If I do not have a similar product, I simply redirect the link to / which is the homepage of your ecommerce store.

Go the outside page that has your old link and click it to see if it redirects properly to your new specified page.

That’s it! If you keep an eye on your traffic, over time you will find a lot of old links that can be repurposed to increase the relevancy and authority of your store, which will lead to better search engine rankings and more traffic 🙂

Let me know if that was useful and if you have any questions on this method. And remember, here’s my Shopify referral link, in case you decide to start your own store and don’t mind me making a few bucks from you signing up. Thanks!

Finding expired domains isn’t that hard, too just need to take a few things into consideration before you spend money on them.

In this video I will walk you through my exact process of finding the golden nugget domains that can help my new Shopify store get an instant SEO boost. Starts around the 60 second mark.

If you’re wondering how an expired domain can help with SEO, think about it this way; Let’s say you’re moving house and you’ve got no furniture whatsoever. The neighbourhood your moving into just so happens to have their annual bulk rubbish pickup. This means everyone in the neighbourhood is putting all sorts of stuff, including furniture on the verge.

You’d be surprised to see how good some of the stuff is that people just discard!

An expired domain is very much like that; it has had a website on it for a while, it has had traffic and incoming links from other websites over the years. This means Google knows about it and it has probably ranked for certain things too.

When I buy an expired domain, I go through its history and see what kind of links it still has coming in. Once I’m happy with what I find, I will deploy a new website/store on the domain and make sure that I facilitate all the incoming links by either redirecting them to the new corresponding pages on my new website, or to complete revive the old internal link (make an exact same page URL as the old site had before it expired.)

The time between expiry and revival is usually less than a month and although Google might have since removed it from their index, they usually are quick to include it again once they find a new website on the domain. Just be sure to go through the whole Google Search Console setup to submit a sitemap etc.

Apps and website I use in this video: (and yes, there’s a few referral links in there which will make me a few bucks if you sign up through them 🙂